Dav ap Grif – an excerpt

This is an excerpt from a new play called Dav ap Grif. The year is 1283.  Dafydd ap Gruffudd, the last free leader of Wales, is in his condemned cell. On the other side of the four walls he believes his words are being recorded by monks for the chronicles and therefore posterity. There’s a lot more fiddling to be done with this, especially with regard to the punctuation. The odd line will have an awry rhythm. But I think the point of the story, his reason for telling it, is plain.

I may stand here brutalised by defeat. But do not mistake me or my race.

I was not always as you see me now.

Imagine that you are a war veteran, feted and garlanded, a man who has fought with the highest honour and distinction. Kings recognise and rely on you. You are the first to be entrusted with planning the attack, and to lead it at full speed towards the enemy lines with a determination and a force of will that makes it clear that you’d prefer suicide to retreat. And the men that follow you feel the same.

Imagine that you have killed most of what walks and crawls this earth.

You’ve never been taught the ways of chivalry because you embody them naturally. You are ruthless when need be but understand how mercy, when tactically employed, can build towards ultimate victory. You have shunned promotion when it has meant administering above the fray, instead of fighting in it. You are allowed to pass freely through all borders, pay no tax, and are exempt from obeying authority, apart from the Pope and his papal bull.

A clear mission, then; with ample resources.

You have slaughtered unarmed prisoners in Haifa – peace be upon you! – seen the walls of Jerusalem and slept under the Dome of the rock. You have hunted heretics in the south of France, and ridden under the gaze of brown bears in the Black forest.

You have survived to embellish the tale, but only to underline the contribution of others. You seek nothing for yourself but the giddy thrill of being in the most important place at the most important time.

But you remain a poor soldier of Christ.

You have been assured by the highest clergy that the final judgement will be a short and predictable affair of crying angels and fulsome praise. But, for now, there is work to be done, piecework, mercenary work that is usually unworthy of you. But the King has asked you personally. And so you find yourself at the edge of a forest in Wales.

You are on the hunt for the likes of me.

You plunge into the wood. The Welsh wood. Our wood where you can go from a warm clearing to a cold dell in a step. A place of instinct, not reason, and a place of whispers, sighs and breath.

So what? You have arrived with your shock troop, to a man fearless, your souls protected by an armour of faith just as your bodies are protected by an armour of steel. You fear neither demons nor men. You follow tracks, heavy tracks, freshly made by a gross of Welsh peasants and boys who lack the sense to walk in single file. This is too easy. There is food everywhere, limitless water, how different to the rationed desert. Who would believe that two such different places could be ruled by the same sun? You drink from your flask and signal to your men to walk a strung out line into the wood. You look up. High winds have stripped the summer trees of their leaves. There is nowhere for the likes of me to hide unless we can conceal ourselves behind spider’s webs.

A cold lick on your neck, your feet unsure on the ground, dried out mud ruts and the footfalls of deer. Don’t go looking for something in a forest, don’t arrive at the edge in doubt, but you are not in doubt, you are sure, it’s a clear mission, amply resourced!

You descend further into the green and dappling light. You hear the song of a blackbird, a song that’s followed all your travels.

You smile.

You scowl.

The skin on your face has changed from a tone of flabby damp to tight sunburn. Barbed leaves that felt like feathers across your cheek have told on your skin. You dismount and tie up your horse. Only then do you see how hawthorn has flayed her chest into blood and froth.

Voices.

Your men are calling out, speaking in tongues, gabbling and shaky. Dare you call back? Are you sure they’re your men? The language is indistinct. Triumph and disaster are in the same key.

Mist.

Creeping in, white shifting spirits curling around the trees, are those the children abandoned to die here when their families couldn’t support them? You hear them tapping the snarled roots, searching for company, damn the man who told you that story, but it’s only a story, it’s only a story, it’s only.

By the way. Where are your friends if the voices aren’t your friends?

Shock troop shocked you flinch at a crow but it’s a leaf, or a patch of sky framed by two moving branches.

Or not. What happened to the track you’re following? Here not a blade of grass is disturbed, not even by you. You look back. There is no trace of where you’ve been. It’s as if you’ve been still for as long as the tree you lean against.

Quiet. Stay your breath.

Listen.

You’re alone now but you’ve brought so much with you.

And in you.

Imps of the far east, the demon Iblis, he that causes despair, he that you did not believe existed has followed you over half a world – has he? – the watchers, the damned, the ghost stories your brother dripped into your ear, the smell rot of the forest floor mingling the dead, babies crying or is it a jay screaming as you trip through its roost.

Yes.

The sun is going down. Did you forget that was going to happen?

A warm lick across your neck. You look back but you should be looking up, you look up but you should be looking ahead. Pride says you dare not retreat. You could go that way and this way to avoid the eyes, always presume there are eyes, on no account must you retreat, you have your mission.

What was that?

What.

Is that?

A body sat on a stump and hunched forward. You don’t draw your sword. Limpid hand bones hang from its wrists. You walk past a white frame covered in debris and braced against a tree. It looks like a rushed shelter. You walk up to him. You reach out your finger as if to make a gentle point to a child and follow the contour of the forehead down to the gaping hole above the lip; the nose and jaw, like Jesus from his grave, long gone. You rub the chipped tooth and feel it snag on your skin.

You make the sign of the cross and wonder if you knew him, wonder of he is one of your many missing, such is the nature of this game you play.

What happened to a ‘good death’, if not in battle then surrounded by friends and family? With a priest to administer the Last Rites and the final forgiveness of sin. Sudden death, the bad death, this death, you fear. To die without confessing your sins or receiving the last rites means Purgatory. Or Hell.

His sons were meant to bear his body wrapped in a silk tunic covered with elaborations. A sculptor from Dresden to carve his effigy, his head on a pillow, his feet on a lion. A suitable monument to reflect his prowess, his elite status, his avoidance of sin.

His virility.

You now recognise him. There is no shock. No rapid heartbeat. Your skin is dry, breathing normal, mouth wet and you feel no temperature though above the canopy of leaves you know it has begun to snow.

It’s a skull that looks the way of all skulls. But it supported a face you’ve seen ripple in many a morning river, and touched as you splashed it with water.

You circle him.

You circle you.

The chainmail taken from the Saracen – may God grant him grace! – at Al Mansurah now rusted by your seeping body. It’s you, the sword and scabbard bought in Milan. It’s you, the leathery scar behind the ear from the siege of Tripoli. It’s you the chipped tooth from the dwarfish Egyptian whore in Damascus who swiped you with a wine jug. It’s you, the ring of neck bone cracked by the slicing knife. And you look back to the white frame that you took for a broken shelter and see it’s your horse’s skeleton, picked and bleached with its halter frayed about its skull that’s tucked into the leaves and the half circle, half worn ruts dug by her legs in her death throes.

It’s you.

Quite. Quite. Dead. And now, so it seems, a ghost.

How?

And you recall the warm whip of air that flicked your throat, the stroke of grass across your neck, but thought nothing of. You look again at the cleft on your throat and see that will have died immediately.

How did the decay happen so quickly? Well now there is no such thing as time. It may feel as if you left your brothers in arms only an hour ago. But the boy that killed you – and it was a boy – is now already an old man.

How could anyone come near you? How could anyone touch you? You saw what was above, you could see what was around, with sword in hand you could spin a diameter of twenty feet, slide and insinuate like a horned viper, you could twirl your bend sinister to take the falling arrow, you could fly.

But you’re dead! (laughs)

(serious) Your throat’s been sliced, by a Welsh lad, in a Welsh forest, and in a most matter-of-fact fashion.

None but brave warriors die on the battlefield. Such men, afraid of nothing when alive, don’t care for dogs, wolves, eagles or crows when dead. They want the land, the whole forest, marsh and peak to lie upon. Every animal can come and eat his flesh.

Let this comfort you.

And remember.

It was a clear mission… amply resourced…

 

MARY SISTER OF MARY

FROM: ‘A Friend of Peace and Good Order.’
TO: Edward Crompton Lloyd Hall, High Sheriff of Cardiganshire
Dated 25th Aug 1843
“…fish can go no further than Felingigfran to spawn. It has also come to my attention that the vicar of Eglwyswrw, the Reverend D. Protheroe has been feeding his sheep in the churchyard where grass grows from the putrefaction of human bodies. These sheep have been sold at Cardigan thereby proving the said Reverend D. Protheroe a cannibal…”

Rebecca: “What is this my children? There is something in my way. I cannot go on….”
Rioters: “What is it, mother Rebecca? Nothing should stand in your way,”
Rebecca: “I do not know my children. I am old and cannot see well.”
Rioters: “Shall we come and move it out of your way mother Rebecca?”
Rebecca: “Wait! It feels like a big gate put across the road to stop your old mother.”
Rioters: “We will break it down, mother. Nothing stands in your way.”
Rebecca: “Perhaps it will open…Oh my dear children, it is locked and bolted. What can be done?”
Rioters: “It must be taken down, mother. You and your children must be able to pass.”
Rebecca: “Off with it then, my children.”

*

Whatever their discipline artists get to an age where they obsess over making the big statement. Or, a la Bob Dylan, they find the principal well is dry and so make metal sculpture. Go figure, so to speak. It doesn’t matter how successful they are because the delusion is like rain and sciatica. We all get wet. We all get old. The big canvas or the turbine hall, the four movements of embedded jazz that trace the story of the cosmos in 6/8, 5/4 and why for, the translation of Dante from English into Urdu and then back again. Et al.
Write anonymous haikus; with a smile press them into a stranger’s hand; get sloshed. Repeat. Isn’t something like that worthy enough? Isn’t it worthy of you? No. You’ve got big statements to make. You’re getting older. Tick-tock tick-tock.

These photographs are from a selection taken over the past five years. Stand at my front door and this place is a weak throw of a large stone away. I thought there was a big statement here.

The graveyard was small but full. The graveyard is small but full. There were approximately seventy graves. There are approximately seventy graves but at least two hundred bodies and only eight or nine surnames. Typhoid, all pervading, can simultaneously fill a space and void a community. Apart from the odd exception the graveyard is populated by children and teenagers who died in the mid third of the 19th century. The paper trail is practically non-existent. I can only surmise that parents aren’t buried there because the graveyard was full by the time they passed away. To spend so little time together in life only to spend none at all in eternity. Typhoid graves are traditionally deep. Shakepeare’s tomb, rumoured to be seventeen feet down, is capped by a curse that is memorable but redundant. He is visited by thousands but left undisturbed. But his corpse, once buried, may have disturbed the fate of thousands. Later on that. Here, though, on this tiny patch, we  have the disquieted that are visited by no-one.

Was to is and were to are. Is this place of rest gone now that it’s been reformulated, now that the cemetery itself has been unceremoniously buried? Or is it still there even if a car park, lawn and play area now cover the ground? It obviously isn’t a place of mourning. If it’s true that when we die we live on in the hearts of those that remember us then that ‘use’ is certainly over. Now it’s just a derelict repository. But what of me, the solipsist writer, artist, carbon earth-unit vicious for subject matter? What about the regard for lives lived, the character of my heart when I look at these images? Initially I saw them as a simple photo essay. Mary, Sister of Mary seemed like an elegant title, but it was merely neat. I graded the images on a free version of Photoshop, chucked the chaff, and filed them away as maybe the basis for a piece of writing or more likely a piece of work in itself, something enigmatic and frosty to upload and from which viewers could draw differing conclusions. Nothing wrong with gently – not idly! – allowing the images to mean whatever I impartially – not vaguely! – thought they might mean. A metaphor explicating the futility of fighting established fact? Mary’s gone so the mother haunts the next child with the name that signifies grief and let the my audience take it from there? This I could allow by saying to anyone who might possibly ask, well yes, that’s why one way of looking it at it; and then by saying no more. As Art that would do, wouldn’t it? I remember Peter Sellers being asked if he was Peter Sellers and he replying; not today: and he never was Peter Sellers. He was Richard Henry Sellers. Peter was his stillborn elder brother. So the practice of bestowing a dead sibling’s name on the living had a famous history. A few cursory chats with friends and acquaintances proved the practice more common than I thought. So, yes, as a bit of Art that would do to be getting on with. A bit of Art that with time and delusion would be construed as a Big Statement. But self satisfied isn’t the same as a satisfied self.

What gnawed was that these were real people that walked these same lanes; and I was demeaning their souls – whose existence I allow for completely; and maybe my own – at best a work in progress.  Even though I’ve often hid within it I’ve always loathed the Dylan Thomas line that allowed him to look after the words only for the meaning to look after itself; and here I was doing it with images, juxtapositioning prettily and paying no heed to my obligation. What was that, though? Was it the same niggle I get when urban playwrights use the rural as a blank canvas, but cry foul if a country kid in a pith helmet turns up on their turf with a voice recorder and walks the urban talk for his or her artistic ends? What a nerve. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m losing the essential reserves of chutzpah.

Maybe I’m just frightened.

Now I notice that I keep saying mother when she had a name: Elizabeth. Their father, John Howell, refuses to reveal himself to me at all. Whenever I’ve turned to this file of images I have to forcibly remind myself that he existed. A great part of me wants to recognise this as the story of four women and nothing else. I have no easy answer as to why that might be. But the absence has given me an idea of how to cast him in a drama.

He’s a Rebecca Rioter.

It was the numbers that did it. Me, the numerical dunce. I’d taken a close look at the numbers and cracked the ice. The second Mary was born the year her sister Mary died. The dates indicate that Elizabeth was pregnant at the funeral; and that their sister, Sarah, who was to die a few months later, probably stood at her side. That same year – 1843 – Rebecca rioters stormed the partially built Narberth workhouse. The Castlemartin yeomanry were summoned to keep them at bay and to guard the completion of the building. The history books say the locals were rioting against the toll gates. But it was far simpler than that. They were horrified by how closely their lives resembled eternal damnation.

This is as far as I went because something rather beautiful happened.

*

Ali Goolyad ready for action.

Tonya Smith leads a discussion of the Mary images.

Most people know who said that you can’t win anything with kids. I say you can’t lose. When The National Youth Theatre of Wales offered us at Narberth Youth Theatre a three day workshop I knew immediately what we should have its foundation: Mary Sister of Mary. Luckily everyone agreed; and it’s here that I recede into the background. For the most part all I did was listen. Tonya Smith led workshops that studied the behavioral differences in both teachers and pupils between the mid 19th c and now.  A classroom was set up. The members moved between the stoic formality, with the onerous onus on repetition – but not alliteration! –  of yesteryear’s teaching methods, to the social media sponsored selfawareness and pace of the superinformation multi-lane highway of education today. Music was used to set a mood, but Tonya’s sensitivity to the shifts in body language that this time travel required was the prime mover in creating strong drama from the most subtle of advice.

Ali talked of the parallels between Somali and Welsh culture. He recognised the causes of the Rebecca Riots, and was profound on how those roots paraphrase and mirror events in Somalia now. His writing workshop that accessed the minds of Welsh children who lived over hundred and fifty years ago was deeply informed by the travails experienced by Somalian children today and produced stunning results. But this was because our members responded beautifully to the task. All wrote short stories from myriad points of view which they then performed. I was struck by the ease with which the male members’ writing inhabited and gave voice to the female experience; and how the female voices brought Mary and her generation into the room in 3-D. It was a charged and emotive experience for us all. The forty minute video of these monologues is being edited and will be posted on the NYT website in the near future.

This from my notebook as I observed the sessions: Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events is a staple… Ordinary people instigating extraordinary events ends in revolution. Mary, Sister of Mary concerns both… Physical conditions, the social fabric, the conflict of ideas… The personal drama close up, crowded in by historical events. Absent father radicalised, given purpose by the uprising fatally ignores the lives he wants to improve.

We paid a visit to the sublime Narberth Museum where there is a section devoted to the Rebecca Riots and it’s causes. This inspired part of the group to improvise a scene in a pub where the idea behind Rebecca is first raised by the disaffected. As they performed this and listened to Tonya’s notes the decision was taken to create a piece for public performance called Mary, Sister of Mary.

BRIEF NOTES ON THE BACKGROUND

John Jones

This painting by is by Thomas Brigstocke. Brigstocke was an important painter so it follows that Jones was an important man; and it can be deduced from the painting that he was also a very busy man. It isn’t the ink well or the legal papers that indicate an active life. It’s his neck. Mentally undress it and judge the distance between the shoulders and chin. Rather long, isn’t it? He could be a member of the Ndebele tribe. His trunk is also impossibly elongated. Are we looking up at him or straight on? We think we are looking from a low position but we’re not looking up his nostrils, are we? The reason for all of this is that Brigstocke would have used lenses to project an image of Jones onto the canvas, done for the sake of accuracy and speed. Jones was only there to have his face painted and only for the amount of time needed to get the correct proportions. Lenses have a limited field of view so three projections would have to be performed for this painting. The distortion is similar to the photojoiners we used to make from Polaroids in school. Collage three photos of the legs, the midriff and the chest to head and you get a similar effect to the painting of Jones. I think it would make a great scene; an impatient Jones dictating letters while having his portrait speedily painted followed by a scene illustrating the depradations resulting from his policies.

John Jones “of Ystrad” was MP for Carmarthen from 1821 to 1832. He was born in King Street, Carmarthen, the son of a solicitor. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford before qualifying as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1831, he was injured in rioting at Carmarthen during the general election. The voting was called off, and the election for the constituency had to be re-run in August, when Jones retained the seat.  His efforts to have the salt tax abolished earned him the nickname “Jones yr Halen” (“Jones the Salt”). He was described as ‘a Tory in politics but in private life a Liberal.’ A pragmatist, then, with –  to add a further detail that’s hidden in the portrait – a brass neck.

The decade preceding the Rebecca Riots was a time when any dissatisfied citizen, under the cloak of anonymity – see ‘A Friend of Peace and Good Order’ at the beginning of this piece –  could find a willing printer of verbal weaponry, be it truthes or a lies, that would damage the cause of any man important enough to be the object of a personal grievance. These political or condemnatory leaflets were the modern quivalent of nameless political blogs of the ‘community pressure’ type. John Jones was often a target. “One of the Dear Little Boys” (as he described himself) alleged: “John Jones has imprisoned me and got me tried as a Rioter at the last Assizes, for doing nothing more than crying out REFORM! He has thus shown how he would use you if it was in his power. He was very glad of my services at one time, but as soon as I began to think for myself, he sent me to Prison and would have transported me if he could. I am a hard working man, but I think a little Reform would do us all good. John Jones told us last Election that he was something of a Reformer too, but I said then that we could not trust him, and now I find that I was right, for I am told that all the time he was in London he was in company with those wicked wretches called boroughmongers” (being someone who buys or sells parliamentary seats.)

The Pembrokeshire election of 1831 was bitterly contested. Remember this is before the Reform Act so the underlying story was one of family, not party, rivalry for power. Voters, only men of course and only of certain means, had to travel from all over Pembrokeshire to vote in Haverfordwest. Sir John Owen of Orielton, the incumbent MP was a Tory. He was up against reformers – Whigs –  who were a tad miffed by the fact that he’d been elected unopposed four times. They set up an opponent for him, Robert Fulke Greville, a man the Irish might call a desperate chancer. Owen’s agents hung around the polling booths, ready to question every Greville supporter’s right or suitability to vote.  A Pembrokeshire farmer would be surrounded and asked; are you the Pope of Rome?; Are you a peer of the realm?; Do you hold office under the crown?; Are you a lunatic?; Are you the Prime Minister? The answers to be given in writing. It sounds like Pinter. When Greville protested he was told his own agents had started this practice in Castlemartin, forty miles away. Who had time to check if this was true? Men only had horses and poor roads. If a farmer came up with unsatisfactory answers – which was likely given the nature of the questions and their browbeating delivery – then his eligibility was put to an assessor or to the High Sheriff who was, of course, a close friend of Owen. When the polls closed 300 men hadn’t voted because of these tactics.  Owen won, just. Both men were bankrupted. Greville bought a pint for every man who voted for him. He had a tab in every pub in Pembrokeshire. That would bankrupt most men when you consider the fact that any house that set up a trestle and barrel was considered a pub.

When John Jones went to Haverfordwest to support Sir John he insulted Greville. A duel was arranged between the two at Tavernspite on 22nd October 1831. Jones ‘received’ as they say Greville’s shot, but he refused to apologise and fired his pistol into the air. Honour was satisfied without the interference of the law. The above painting is now in the jury room of The Guildhall in Carmarthen.

Soon the country was brought to the brink of revolution and it was the realisation of this danger that ultimately ensured the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. In another leaflet, signed by “A Burgess”, Jones is criticised for his political record and his manners: “Everyone knows that he has talked us over pretty well for some years, but I have been often wondering why he can’t make a speech in Parliament. Is he thought of no more there than I of him, and as you all thought of him at our Slave Meeting the other day, where (in spite of the wishes of every lover of humanity) he insultingly sneered at the proceedings, although Chairman at the same time? Now the Boroughmongers and the Slave holders, with John Jones in the middle of them, were joined together to oppose Ministers in the great work of Reform — fine company indeed for our Member, after being returned three times free of expence . . . Witness how very friendly he is during, or a little before, Elections; I almost supposed him to be the pattern of humility, but as soon as that business is over, goodbye friendship, goodbye (I was going to say manners) but stop, I will give you a sample of manners. Some of us were giving vent to our feelings in a real way last evening in Spilman Street, when who came out of the Ivy Bush, but the good John Jones himself — who blackguarded us — offered to fight any of us — and at last told us to **** ourselves — there’s manners for you…”

And then there was The Poor Law of 1834. It was meant to ensure that the poor were housed in workhouses, clothed and fed. Children who entered the workhouse would receive some schooling. In return for this care, all workhouse paupers would have to work for several hours each day. Some people welcomed it because they believed it would reduce the cost of looking after the poor, take beggars off the street and encourage poor people to work hard to support themselves.

Before 1834, the cost of looking after the poor was growing more expensive every year. This cost was paid for by the middle and upper classes in each town through their local taxes. But they suspected that they were paying the poor to be lazy and avoid work. Although most people did not have to go to the workhouse, it was always threatening if a worker became unemployed, sick or old. Increasingly, workhouses contained only orphans, the old, the sick and the insane. Not surprisingly the new Poor Law was very unpopular. It seemed to punish people who were destitute through no fault of their own.

However, not all Victorians shared this point of view. Some people, such as the labour reformer Richard Oastler, spoke out against the new Poor Law, calling the workhouses ‘Prisons for the Poor’. The social reformer Jeremy Bentham, though, argued that people did what was pleasant and would not do what was unpleasant – so that if people were not to claim relief, it had to be unpleasant. Relief was to be stigmatised, “an object of wholesome horror”. Bentham also believed, ” it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” With a certain irony Rebecca agreed, considering how support for her could be found at all levels of society.

A play then. Best get on with it; and you’ll notice that I’ve avoided the phrase, ‘contemporary resonance.’ It’s just another way of saying plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But the temptation to invite IDS to the opening night may well be overwhelming even if it would only be symbolic.

*

Shakespeare. Some years ago Pembrokeshire was invaded by LNG engineers, moles laying the pipeline from Milford Haven to Tirley in Gloucestershire. I was in The Eagle in Narberth with a friend of mine and we were talking about typhoid, as you do. I happened to mention that Shakespeare’s grave was seventeen feet deep and that the funeral was hastily arranged which indicated typhoid as a cause of death. One of these LNG engineers overheard this and asked whether the church was close to the river. I confirmed that it was. He nodded and commented that they buried him in the water table and that he could well have infected half of Warwickshire. Then he finished his pint and left.

MACBETH APPROACHES notes pt1

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches.

My first experience of Shakespeare was a professional production of Macbeth at the local theatre. I was in school uniform, laden with Curly Wurlys, stubbies of Panda cola and dynamite sticks of sherbert so I was at least eleven years of age. I must have looked like Tucker Jenkins but with the juts of a suicide bomber. Most of us were taking advantage of our parents absence. If you’re brought up in a rural area then the opportunities for shopping alone as an adolescent are limited. You don’t drive so when you do find yourself face to face with the sweet counter it’s under parental supervision. To be thus unshackled in the theatre tuck shop – with extra financial subsidy from Gran – was a rare freedom.

I remember the staging as very dark and indistinct – probably influenced by Nunn’s famous production at The RSC, not that I’d know that for another twenty years or so – and that the smoke machine added an atmosphere that made the Stygian stink. You could see metallic elements shimmer in the air, but these could have been the phosphenes one sees after a fit of heavy coughing. The stars are meant to be on stage and telling the story though: and there lay the greatest problem.

I couldn’t understand a word of it: or do I mean comprehend? I was young and there isn’t an easy way to be introduced to the flow of Shakespeare’s language. You can’t hope to survive a swollen river by doggie paddling, and the teacher devoted, or perhaps devoided to taking you through the plays word by word is also dedicated to extremes of ennui and an epic missing of the point, like head banging to James Blunt. You’d rather drown. It was only a few years later that we had a teacher who taught us, line by line, how the rhythm holds the melody together so as to create that miracle of meaning. Well that’s how it seems to me. You have to be lucky to get this teaching. I must thank him one day if I can find him.

I’ve never asked a professional actor what it’s like to play a matinee in front of three hundred children. It’s akin to prisoners of war returning to the village. Some experiences are beyond language. To ask is to demean. All that talent, training and application only to find yourself reciting, ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ to a Pembrokeshire school party hosted by Caligula with catering by Cadburys. To everyone’s relief by the time ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow’ was rendered we had all become quite dumb, reactive hypoglyceimia having stunned us into black-eyed comas. By drinking Panda we became pandas. If they hadn’t stopped over-acting on stage at least we’d stopped acting up. Caligula taught maths by the way, and was along because he was interested, so it goes. It was one of those rare instances when the staffroom sobriquet for a colleague had leached down to the pupils and become common currency. It’s perturbing now to think that the staff room had been watching the Tinto Brass film. Worse still were the occasions when some of our more insecure pedagogues tried to be jocular and used a pupil’s nickname instead of the one on the register, usually during a free lesson or on the last day of term. When we renamed Gerwyn Bowen Toyah it was for us to use and him to laugh off – which he had sense enough to do – and not a tool to help a teacher ingratiate himself. He was called Toyah, by the way, because when Thomas History asked Bowen to name the capital of France – a geography question, surely? – Bowen replied, ‘It’s a mystery.’ As ever, it’s all in the delivery.

But I do remember the Witches. I don’t remember what they look like, nor do I recall anything of their performance. Were they barefoot beldames or simpering girls? One or more probably foamed at the mouth but I can’t be sure. I just have a very strong sense memory of horror. Note that this is over thirty years ago. There is some lily gilding to follow.

For the most part it’s auditory. Think of a beach on a sunny day. It’s buzzing with families. There isn’t a sigh of wind but there is a heavy growling surf, sure evidence of fog off the coast. It drifts in under its own weight, diffuses the light, and lightly brushes cold spots onto your body. You close your eyes, everything seems blushed and you note the strata of sounds for what they could be: the waves are buildings falling down and thunder. Adult voices are lowset and indistinct but are spreading false rumour, dogs digging holes in the sand are scuffling demons: and the children scream like little terrors terrified; or terrifying. All it takes is a recalibration of the senses – and to be open to that change or be caught unawares – for the familiar to become sinister. That’s what I remember of the opening minute: and it’s a clue as to how we’ll approach the film.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen…

We are the invaded. The castles of Wales are not the castles of Wales and their heydays were short. They were relics of conquest before they were even finished. The money ran out, most of it in the direction of Jerusalem. Sometimes the castles were sacked by the locals so the soon to be erstwhile invaders found themselves on the outside looking in; and sometimes the locals would look out from the inside and think: now what? To be on the outside looking in was obviously wrong, or at least it didn’t feel right. But if you were inside then at some stage you had to leave because there was nothing in there to begin with. To take a castle was to besiege oneself. Once this point was understood their gates were dismantled, and the conquerors and conquered could begin breeding with each other.

If you want to get a sense of what a castle would have been like during its halcyon then you only have to think back to the Cold War installations of the seventies and eighties; the checkpoints, the watchtowers next to fields of Friesans and corn. Our daily bus to Haverfordwest would stop to take on a sentry before it entered the gated communities where the RAF and USN families lived. He’d share a cigarette and some state secrets with the driver. I’d stare at his semi-automatic rifle while my Walkman chewed Welcome to the Pleasuredome. The local populace were employed to run the basic aspects of the infrastructure: cook food, serve beer, mow and clean while being watched by foriegners who were trained to kill. The Americans were there to listen for Russian submarines. The RAF were there to look for them. Years later I lived under the Heathrow flightpath and slept soundly even though I was a country boy. I can’t think of many families that didn’t have some sort of connection to Brawdy or any of the other installations in Pembrokeshire. These radar stations, airfields and armament depots don’t figure as part of the tourist industry. But they will figure in the film; and it was often noted that the influx of new blood that manned these outposts was good for the peninsular: paene meaning almost: insula, island. But as I said. We are the invaded, only now it’s tourists, dolphins and retirees.

Oracular lines in the sky by day, galaxies bearing down by night. Shrines to Hecate in hedgerows. Nature reclaiming the man made. The supernatural reclaiming Macbeth, the play. I see the supernatural as being one hundred per cent inclusive. The singularity preceding the Big Bang was supernatural, the supernatural passes through some people like neutrinos, with others it infects them like radiation sickness: but it’s there, it’s all pervading. The Macbeths are as much victimized by genuinely external supernatural forces that haunt the universe as they are by any malignancy that comes from within themselves. This isn’t a domestic tragedy with vague phantasmal overtones. The evil – or perhaps horrific indifference – is all pervading; and if it is seen to be a chamber piece – there is school of thought that says it was written for indoor performance – this doesn’t preclude the universe itself from being a trap. Banquo isn’t a ghost because he is murdered. Banquo is a ghost because he died. Apologies if this sounds overblown. But I am a skeptic so, for now, I have to force myself to believe if I’m to make the film believable to the cast.

Here is a description of Macbeth from Glen Byam Shaw’s 1955 prompt book for the Stratford production starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

Macbeth – 42 years of age. A superb leader and soldier with the courage of a lion and the imagination of a poet. A man of iron discipline and will-power and an almost hypnotic personality. There is something marvellously mysterious about him. The sort of man who can make one nervous by just looking at one. No one would ever dare to slap Macbeth on the back or be jolly with him. Even his friends find him a bit over-powering and his soldiers and servants are terrified of his anger. He is tremendously proud and confident, but never shows off or blusters. When he speaks other people remain silent… He is like a man who is mentally diseased, but the magnificence and courage of his nature remain till the end.

No. He isn’t forty two years of age. He is much younger; and by the end he is unmanned. Filming this with a young cast – by the time we begin principal photography the eldest will be twenty – isn’t a matter of necessity, it’s an artistic choice. In the words of Jim Morrison, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Macbeth’s milk of human kindness doesn’t quite cut it for his lady. Not when their child died in her arms and there is no hope of another. She sees contemporaries breed and suckle. She sees babies grow into their parent’s likeness. What else is there strive for but absolute power? What else is there but to re-mother her husband, banish his boyish edges and take everything?

*

PLAYBOY: Knife in the Water was an original, and unusual screenplay. Where did you get the idea for it?

POLANSKI: It was the sum of several desires in me. I loved the lake area in Poland and I thought it would make a great setting for a film. I was thinking of a film with a limited number of people in it as a form of challenge. I hadn’t ever seen a film with only three characters, where no one else even appeared in the background. The challenge was to make it in a way that the audience wouldn’t be aware of the fact that no one else had appeared even in the background. As for ther idea, all I had in mind when I began the script was a scene where two men were on a sailboat and one fell overboard. But that was a starting-point, wouldn’t you agree?

PLAYBOY: Certainly, but a strange one. Why were you thinking about a man falling out of a sailboat?

POLANSKI: There you go, asking me how to shrink my head again. I don’t know why. I was interested in creating a mood, an atmosphere, and after the film came out, a lot of critics found all sorts of symbols and hidden meanings in it that I hadn’t even thought of. It made me sick.

*

That’s enough for now. Here are some pictures of proposed locations in Pembrokeshire.

And here’s our Macbeth: Ben Bubb.

And our Lady Macbeth: Bethan Thomas.